Lemon... I needed more lemon zest in the frosting. If I'd filled them with French's lemon pie filling they'd have been perfect! I need to use an open star piping tip when I have zest in the frosting. It clogged up the one I used (2D) and made the job very difficult.

Chocolate... I realized after making another batch of the frosting that I'd doubled the first batch but only put in a single batch of the jam. The frosting was still good but would've been fantastic with all the jam in it. I tried the chocolate cake recipe I did because it had more chocolate in it. Everyone loved them and I thought they were ok. Although it's claimed that the recipe makes a good stacking cake. I'm tenative on that claim. I originally planned on making the linked raspberry filling (smitten's) in the recipe but decided I didn't want the extra work. I think if I'd made the frosting as I was suppose to AND filled them it would've been too much.

Vanilla... I wouldn't call this vanilla but almond which is fine by me because I LOVE almond. The cake was delicious. The frosting was ok. I made it because everyone raved about it and said it was very workable. I agree with the workable part. I could see it being used for decorating a cake. For all the frosting though, I'd prefer a frosting with some real butter in it. I'll use the frosting recipe again, as decoration purposes only.

Carrot... I added crushed pineapple and used pecans instead of walnuts. It was good cake but next time I'd substitute the yellow cake for a carrot cake boxed mix. It didn't have enough spices as I'd like, even after adding allspice to it. The frosting though was out of this world!!!! Allison suggested we tell everyone the carrot cakes stink so they'd leave them alone and we'd have tons to bring back home. lol I told her we COULD make more in the future. I was eating the frosting on the chocolate and almond cupcakes and it was yummy too. This coming from a person who doesn't care for most orange flavored things. Again, a note about the zest clogging up the tip...change to a more open tip... 1M perhaps?

I made 2 batches of each...one batch regular size cupcakes and the next mini cupcakes. We frosted 66 or so of the minis to take. I came home with just enough. Allison took a tray of them to a cookout today and we had them for breakfast. I think there are about 6 large ones left and 10 mini ones. If there's a next time I think I'd consider just mini ones...giving each guest a plate to take a sample of each. They didn't have plates at the reception and I didn't think to ask for them until it was almost over.

As I mentioned above we used the 2D tip to frost them. We started from the inside and went to the outside so it made the cake tops look like roses. The mini ones were actually harder to frost them the regular sized ones. For decorations I used white chocolate. I piped an outline of a heart for the large cupcakes and made solid hearts for the mini ones. I then hit them with gold pearl dust. I tried the wilton's edible spray paint but it didnt' adhere to the chocolate very well. Thinking I might have wanted yellow colored chocolate instead of white. But it still looked good.

About Me

I'm Kim, a 47yo little bit of everything, not much of anything type of gal. I've been married to Tom for 29yrs. We have 12 pretty cool kids as a result of that marriage (5 boys and 7 girls...ages 28 to 5). I've recently added the title of grandma to my name with the arrival of my first granddaughter and a grandson soon to join us.